I feel like a worm. Not in the slimy sense, but in the coming late sense.

Let me explain, there was this one time when my family went driving through the country to drop off an uncle of mine at some relatives’ place. (We weren’t exactly fond of long drives for no particular reason, but that time it just happened.) The family we were visiting had a nice farmhouse. After some walking around, I happened to find my brother sitting at the corner of a balcony looking down at some chickens pecking away in back yard.

And for some strangely philosophic moment (I usually don’t associate these things with my brother ), he looks at me and says – Rosh, you know all the things they say about getting up early and all, right? Early to bed and early to rise makes you… and early bird gets the worm and stuff? And I say – yeah. And he says – look at what the worm got for getting up early.

(Duh?) And he continues – so the moral must be that if you are worm, don’t get up early.

Well, it did have a sense of reason to it… in a sense. This happened years back and for some reason I was reminded of that, feeling weary as I came in to office near afternoon.

The reason I am writing about all this is because all that is going to be changing. < inset background score: time they are a changin’ here >  I am going be a worm no more. Someone at Microsoft is transferring to Singapore and is giving away his cycle at a garage sale – I think I am going to be picking it up. It’s got a nice set of Shimano (shimano.com) gears on it. And when I have a cycle I am going to get up at six and will go cycling in the mornings. So there.

I guess.

On a different note, I have been looking at various university websites the past few days for interesting research in computer science. I was hoping to find some interesting work in languages research to integrate better data handling models into languages – something along the lines of what COmega tries to do. I was a little disappointed to come up with next to nothing.

I read this book recently, called the ‘Curious incident of the doing in the Night-time’. It is a curios book written from the perspective of a 15 year old suffering form some form of autism. It starts of with a dog being killed in the neighborhood and the kid trying to play detective to find the killer. I wouldn’t recommend reading it, unless you are in the mood to have something bothering you for a while. The book .. well, I better not say much about it. There was this one thing in the book which has been running in my head for a while now – this book if full of descriptions of how the protagonist sees various things in his life.

In this part he remembers himself when he was smaller. His teacher would show him a jar of (lets say cookies) cookies and ask him what was in it. And he would say cookies. She would then turn over the jar and a pencil (or something else) would fall out. And then when she asked him what was in the jar, he would say pencil. Then if the she asked him, what his mother would say if she was asked what was in the jar, he would still answer pencil. He could not understand why that was wrong. For a long time he did not realize or understand that other people had minds, and this was hard for him.

In a paradoxical kind of way, that is how many of us behave from time to time. There is point at which we reach the borders of our imagination about how others would react to something, because our perception of how they should react is so strongly biased by what we personally know.

On a different note, and this one is about cocktails – I am still nowhere about learning the basics about how drinks mix well.

However here is a little tip: cranberry juice and orange juice mix well together and go well with some vodka. There is something missing here in this combination and I can’t really put my finger on it.

Also, maracuja (passion fruit) and vodka topped with 7up or sprite and some ice is a reasonably pleasant drink.